Heather Broster
The word moquette in Italian comes from the French of the same spelling. It refers to the type of wall-to-wall carpeting found in the most important living spaces of the home, as well as the material from which it is made. Moquette is an invariable feminine noun. Invariable simply means that its form does not …
Most of you have probably come across the words dormire (the verb to sleep) and sonno (the noun sleep) at some point in your Italian studies. But did you know that there is another equally common way to talk about sleep in Italian? The word we’ll be looking at today is nanna, which is a …
A few years back, I remember being in the kitchen with my Italian mother-in-law, helping her prepare a shopping list for the week. The Monday meal was going to consist of her famous zucchini fritters, so I diligently started writing out the word: zucchini… “Zucchini? Don’t you mean zucchine?” she asked, peering bemused over my …
There are numerous false friends in Italian and English, but few cause as much confusion as libreria and library. Although they share the same origin – the Latin word libraria – they mean two very different things. The Italian libreria has retained the original Latin meaning, bookshop or bookstore, whereas the English library denotes the …
The word for a shell, or seashell, in Italian is just as beautiful as the object itself: conchiglia. It can be traced back to the Latin conchylium which in turn comes from the Greek konkhýlion, a derivative of kónkhē meaning “concavity”. So if you ever have trouble recalling this word, just remember that shells are …
There are certain words that just don’t translate. Some of those words are original Italian words that we English speakers have adopted into our own language. This is especially true when we talk about Italian food. Many of the words we accepted into the English language still have the same meaning as the original Italian. …